He is one of 10 volunteers restoring and installing a 1924 Wurlitzer at the Masonic Auditorium theater on Euclid Avenue and E. 36th Street.

Over the past 15 months, the volunteers, members of the Western Reserve Theatre Organ Society, have been working two nights a week on the $100,000 project. They hope to be playing fugues by June.

"We're giving it our best," said volunteer Frank Sillag.

Unlike a church or a concert organ, a theater pipe organ is fortified with percussion, orchestral instruments and an array of crazy sounds: doorbell, train whistle, thunderstorm, horse hoofs, gong, castanets, car horn and more.

In the days of silent films, every movie house in America was equipped with one of these pneumatic contraptions -- usually a Wurlitzer -- accompanying the big-screen antics of tragic clowns, sinister cads and doe-eyed damsels. Today, only about 500 exist.

When the 2,400-pipe instrument at the Masonic Auditorium is completed, northeastern Ohio can boast of having nine theater organs, possibly the highest concentration in the country.

Because so many are here, the American Theatre Organ Society, an organization founded 53 years ago with the aim of preserving theater organs, is holding its annual convention this July in Cleveland.

Unlike other parts of the country, Cleveland has been less aggressive in tearing down old theaters, said Doug Powers, president of the Western Reserve Theatre Organ Society. And his group has been vigilant in saving the organs.

Some are in private homes, and some are in public places. Three are at their original venues: the Lorain Palace Theatre, the Akron Civic Auditorium and the Canton Palace Theatre.

The Masonic Auditorium's Wurlitzer originally was in a theater in Santa Barbara, Calif. It was sold and ended up disassembled and stored in a Michigan man's garage.

Two years ago, the man donated it to the Cleveland group, which rented four big trucks to haul it here.

In 1969, the Warner Theatre in Erie, Pa., donated a Wurlitzer theater organ to Grays Armory in downtown Cleveland. It took the organ society 2 1/2 years and more than 10,000 volunteer hours to install it.

Grays' "Mighty Wurlitzer," maintained and used for concerts by the organ society, is equipped with 1,200 pipes, ranging from 32 feet long to the size of a pencil.

The guts of the machine -- pipes, bellows, electromagnetic components, orchestral instruments and sound-effect gizmos -- fill two rooms a floor above the organ. A basement room houses a powerful fan and more components.

"All of this is operated by wind pressure and a little bit of electricity," Powers said. "There are no speakers. All the sounds are created by air. Everything on this organ is a product of American ingenuity, sweat and talent."

When the Wurlitzer at the Masonic Auditorium's theater is brought back to its second life, the organ society plans to run old silent films.

"Some of it's kind of corny," Powers said. "But it can be done in such a way that is extraordinarily musical. When people hear this thing, they say, 'I had no idea.' "